Posted on 07/18/2005 7:16:29 AM PDT by JohnnyLawrence4U
Megan's Law and its progeny -- the sex offender registration and notification laws on the books in all fifty states -- are godsends for those of us who prefer to live in pervert-free communities. You can't easily sell that nice new house at market value when all potential buyers are thirty seconds of web surfing away from discovering Mulberry Lane's Tattooed Little Secret. But do these laws serve any other purpose? It isn't clear that sex offender registration laws deter crimes. And however good an idea these laws may be, and however settled their constitutionality may be, it's hard to escape the fact that such laws penalize sex offenders simply for having the status of sex offenders. Worst of all, these laws are band-aids on a severed artery. The real question is not where we should house our habitual sexual offenders, but why we allow habitual sexual offenders to pollute society in the first place.
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